Tintin Forums

Harrock:They can't stop people drawing parodies - that would be scary! The Moulinsart police are coming round your house to confiscate your pens! - nor can they realistically prevent people from mass-producing them, unless of course they get wind of it somehow which has happened.
If they know who it is, though, they could go to court and get an injunction to make the producer stop. If they didn't, they would face contempt proceedings. Moulinsart obviously doesn't care that much, because people like Yves Rodier have made their name available, and obviously not much has happened.

Also, the biggest marketplace for these books is the internet which - aside from being difficult and time consuming to police - means that to stop it they would be forced to take out countless lawsuits against individuals, a lot of whom would be their own fans.

Well, never underestimate the power of setting an example so that people won't call your bluff in the future. If you show that you're willing to sepnd thousands on a lawsuit against one guy, the deterrence power that has makes it well worth it for them. This is basically what Metallica did during the whole Napster fiasco... they went after their own fans. (If you have heard the parody of "Enter: Sandman" called "Enter: Napster," that's even one of the lines... "Sue our fans / We're off to Napster Napster land!"). :)

Tintin proves you don't need foul language or nude people to make a good comic book/graphic novel.
The x-rated parodies should be crushed!
But in the US we have freedom of speech, or at least I think, so there's nothing I can do.
Also from what I've got out of this disscussion, the Belgian laws are strict, so it's hard to create an actual good fan-comic.

in the US we have freedom of speech

I believe this is more a copyrights issue.
Many countries have freedom of speech where different limitations apply - indeed, some copyright restrictions even apply to freedom of speech in the US which don't apply elsewhere.

The x-rated parodies might even be considered illegal under obscenity laws in certain countries - possibly in the US where the obscenity laws are stricter.